Compound Eyes of Stockings

 

Even Penelope’s veiling wasn’t as much due to modesty

as it was an oft-rehearsed policy and exercise of power.

 

With wings for women being nixed,

would hosiery then do in their place—

unless some may undo dragonflies

and their crisscrossed and smooth,

the smoothest, blithe membranes?

 

How comes it that something so translucent

lets those slaying raiders soar and fly?

But isn’t it in love the same with words—

those that are just as sheer and light,

 

and not heavy or opaque, move the heart

upward and toward another best,

while shedding all specks of dust?

 

And then one may even want to think

the whole of them should be to light

as a clear cup of glass stands to it.

Certain Things Are Always

 

Certain things are always,

but some are sudden.

But it is the miraculous

happenstance, concord

 

of the two at once—

that awes me most:

with the rupture

that holds some present now

 

by the eternal and timeless,

like a tremor that endures,

failing to cease or die.

 

And in that rupture,

so akin to sunset skies,

one sees where time has cracked.

Audition for a Long-Lost Inside Sense

 

Just as simple touch is drawing
a probing barb—backward first
in order to secure what is forth
and, without retreat, out of reach.

And that touch thus treats all that is
as furtherance, a never-finished
and yet ever-polished face,
in a game of what feels soft,

alongside a pausing solid,
waxing loose and amorous,
to appraise, audit all her ears
as long as inclined, willing.

Paramours thus dip into much,
forgetting their heels and hands:

“Would the garter stop me—
stop me from seeing anything else?”

And amid such trance of induced forgetting,
like travelers at the sight of ancient busts,
they tap and open another long-buried sense—

and remember—

what nothing else will count.